“You’re nothing but a catch-colt, a foundling—picked up bare-nekkid in the road, at that! You don’t know who you be, or what—and you never will! And everybody knows it.”
Rachel’s lips turned white, and curved in a little smile, while her eyes went wide and fixed. The knife in her hand poised in front of her, edge upward, and she moved toward Georgia, light and quick on the balls of her feet.
From the bedroom door Matthilda screamed—“Rachel!”
She stopped short, and the knife clattered from her hand. Before her eyes the room careened and darkened, so that she almost fell.
Georgia had retreated from her, stumbling over her awkward riding skirt. She was not a girl who scared easily, but this time there was horror in her eyes; for she knew she had never been nearer death in her life. Before Rachel’s vision had cleared she was gone.
Matthilda held Rachel in her arms, conforting her, crooning to her. “There, now, there…dear girl…dear, dear little girl….Everything’s all right.”
“What did she mean? Mama—what could she mean?” Rachel was shaking weakly, but her mind was working again.
“Don’t think about it. Put it all out of your mind—please, Rachel—please!”
“She believes it. I’d have known if she was making it up. Mama—is it true?”
Long ago, Matthilda had known this moment might come. In her mind she had rehearsed what she would say, forming two opposite answers, hoping to know when the time came which one to use. One was a straight-out denial, relying upon vehemence and a pretended astonishment. “Why! Shockin’! Fiddlesticks!” The other was meant to be a natural and easy acceptance as of something unimportant. “Why, yes, dear. Of course. Didn’t I ever tell you? Never thought about it, I guess….” An uneasy feeling had remained that neither answer could save the tranquillity she desired for Rachel above all things. Some third way seemed to be hovering just beyond her reach; she never found it.
But the years had come between, dimming the danger and the need. She had almost been able to forget that Rachel was not her own, because she so wanted to forget. Now as she reached for the answers she had devised she could not remember what they had been.
She faltered, “Why—why, Rachel—why, I—” And in that moment of groping it became too late.
“So it’s true, then,” Rachel said.
Chapter Sixteen
For almost a week Rachel tried to find herself, while it seemed to her that not a single familiar compass point remained. Her whole identity had been struck away. These familiar people among whom she lived were in reality strangers; they fed and sheltered her by tolerance and charity, not in accordance with her rights, for she had no rights. Sometimes she recalled moments of rebellion, and times she had asserted herself, and she was shamed. There was self-pity in it, and a chill of fear, as if she had been sleepwalking all her life upon the edge of an abyss. It must be people like me who become fancy girls, she thought, without ever having seen one in her life. Mama had sometimes spoken with horror of the dreadful women who preyed upon the cowboys, in the wild towns at the end of the trails, thanking God that her sons would never go near women like that. But a girl who belonged nowhere and to no one couldn’t be expected to care where she was or what she did, Rachel thought now. She wanted to get away, and lose herself where nobody knew her, and who she was couldn’t matter. Yet she did not know how to turn her back on these people who had done everything for her that had ever been done in her life.
She tried to find out how the Zacharys had come by her in the first place. Matthilda was tempted to invent an elaborate story, giving Rachel an inspiring family history and a romantic orphaning. She would have done it, too, had she not known perfectly well that she would be tripped up by it, soon or late. She compromised by telling part of the truth. Rachel’s natural parents were unknown, she admitted, and this was true. But here she began changing the facts a little bit. Lots of wagons were on their way to California, she said, and Rachel had accidentally got left behind by one of them. At a rest-over camp, called Possum Stop. It wasn’t there any more. Nobody knew which wagon, or why the family never came back to look for their baby. Maybe they’d been fooled on where they lost her—looked a long time in some wrong place. Or…it was possible something happened to them…. It came out a whole lot more lie than truth, before she wiggled out of it, perhaps because so little truth was known.
Matthilda tried to comfort Rachel every way she could think of, for she was as miserable as the girl. She tried reasoning. “Every family has its bad people, and its useless people, and its good people, and its great ones. You are you. You can be what you want to be. What else matters?” She tried religion, in her own conception of it, which was vague, but of high integrity: “God is love. We are his children. We are bound together and sheltered by our love for each other, and His love for us. For love is what God is.” Rachel wasn’t listening.
She had often told Rachel that men hated to see women cry, and that she must teach herself never to weep before anyone. But when everything else failed, Matthilda herself fell back on tears. Now she let her lip quiver, and her eyes brimmed. “I wanted a baby girl so much. I was so happy making your little clothes. All of us loved you so, and wanted you so—didn’t you want us?”
Rachel did love Matthilda very dearly; which was not hard, for no gentler spirit could be imagined. Matthilda could be shocked, or hurt, but no one ever saw her angered; and she lived for her children to an all but fatuous degree.
But now Rachel was cloyed and repelled. She hated herself for it, and she pitied Matthilda, but that was the way she felt. Wanting to be left alone, she pretended she was satisfied, and that everything was all right.
She asked, “How much do the boys know?”
“Andy doesn’t know. He wasn’t born, then. And Cassius—well—I don’t believe he ever thinks about such things. Ben knows, of course; he was seven, then. But we promised each other it would be our secret. We wanted you to be just our own.” Then, pleadingly, while those ready tears threatened again: “We don’t need to say anthing to them. Or to anybody. Ever.” She wanted everything put back just as it had been before. But Rachel did not feel that this could ever be.
All my life I’ll wonder who I am.
She stayed out of the house all she could. She doubted if either Ben or Andy noticed that anything had happened to her, but she stayed away from them, too, what few times they came in. She was watching the tadpoles in a still slough of the Dancing Bird, without seeing them at all, when a strange new idea came to her.
Why, then, Ben isn’t my brother. He isn’t even my cousin. He isn’t any relation at all….
Of course the same thing was true of Cash and Andy, but with them it seemed to make small difference; her affection for them could stay the same, whether they were brothers or just childhood friends. But with Ben it was somehow a peculiarly disturbing, even frightening thought, hard to get near to, after thinking of him as a brother for so long. She circled it skittishly, as a puppy scouts a fascinating new thing that may bite.
Ben had always been much in her thoughts, a good deal more than the others had ever been. She had never realized before how often she wondered where he was and what he was doing, whenever he was out of sight, which was most of the time. But now she reached into the past, and most of the things she remembered best were mixed up with Ben. They were the only ones in the family who kept playing jokes on each other. Like the time Ben sneaked the little green frog into the water pitcher. Rachel had not let on, but after she refilled his water glass the frog was in that. Ben pretended not to see it—seemed about to drink it down, when Mama squealed. Then they both had laughed so hard, over nothing worth it, seemingly, for the others just stared at them, seeing nothing funny.